The sturm und drang over the administration’s proposed Triumphal Arch, National Garden of American Heroes, the White House ballroom, and many other changes to the nation’s capital has largely treated each project in isolation, which neglects the broader impact on one of the world’s most significant ensemble of historically designed landscapes—the Monumental Core, which stretches from the U.S. Capitol Grounds to Arlington National Cemetery, and includes the White House Grounds and the National Mall. And it ignores the key contributions over the span of many decades by one of the people who had the most impact on the capital since Pierre Charles L’Enfant in the late eighteenth century, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. It is vital to acknowledge and understand the nation’s capital as a supreme achievement in landscape architecture and planning if design decisions and alterations of any scale are to be assessed.
There are two critical points in Washington, D.C.’s landscape legacy—L’Enfant’s plan of 1791 and the McMillan Plan of 1902. L’Enfant’s baroque-inspired grand plan laid the city out on a primary grid with a series of diagonal streets radiating outwards and two seminal avenues. The McMillan Plan is the name given to the recommendations made in a report in 1902 by the Senate Park Commission for improving the design and appearance of Washington, D.C., particularly its historic core. The commission, formed in 1901, was chaired by Senator James McMillan of Michigan and included architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and, acting as its secretary, Charles Moore. With the exception of McMillan and Moore, all had been involved to varying degrees in planning the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which inaugurated the City Beautiful ideal in America, whose tenets are clearly expressed in the Commission’s report. It sought, in effect, to restore and amplify L’Enfant’s original plan for the city with the formal grandeur of an extended, cruciform National Mall, framed symmetrically by elms and punctuated by monumental neoclassical architecture in the Beaux-Arts manner, and terminating in what would become the Lincoln Memorial.
The L’Enfant/McMillan comprehensive vision has been the touchstone that has informed and guided the city’s design and has been stewarded by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), which was established by Congress in 1910 and is “the only federal commission dedicated to design review and aesthetic excellence.” The CFA’s influence on the Monumental Core has been singularly profound. The CFA is supposed to be “composed of seven presidentially appointed experts in relevant disciplines including art, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.”
Currently, it is largely bereft of that collective wisdom and notably devoid of any landscape architects.